The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!

Ever since the amazing launch of the first iPhone, I’ve been fascinated by Steve Jobs. After hearing about it, I immediately contacted my friend in the US to help me buy an AT&T locked iPhone to have it shipped halfway across the world. 2011 was the peak of my fascination with Jobs and Apple. At one point, I owned almost Apple’s entire product line: iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS, MacBook Air 11” and iMac 27”.

I was excited when I heard that there was going to be a biography written on Jobs. I pre-ordered it on Amazon, and looked forward to it for months. I devoured the book in little more than a weekend. It was great to learn about Jobs’ thought process, and reading the book made me draw parallels to my own thinking and naively feel that we were similar.

Two years later, I’ve just recently finished re-reading the biography. It felt like a new book to me. Having worked in the smartphone industry for two years, I can relate in a deep way to what’s written in the book. This time, I didn’t feel like Steve Jobs anymore. While I share a few characteristics, we are completely different people.

So, after two readings, and two years of experience, below are a three themes I reflected on while reading the book.

1. People

People are the most important factor, and hiring good people is the highest leverage action founders can take.

Personality and cultural compatibility is important.

The best indicator of someone’s potential is his/her past. But you have to look at it correctly.

Tie compensation to performance, to promote good work and create a fair atmosphere.

Fire poor performers, to increase team performance and keep top performers happy.

Each new hire has to be above the average level of the current team.

A handful of right people in the correct time and place can change the world.

2. Taste

Taste is a huge differentiator.

Some are born with it, some aren’t. For a company to have taste, it has to come from the top.

Expensive (agency work) does not always equal beautiful.

Some companies really have no taste.

A large part of taste is what you’ve absorbed from TV, movies, music, friends, and other parts of your upbringing.

To have taste, you need to cultivate interests, and an opinion — be able to have an opinion and critique works of culture.

3. Faith

To do well, you have to have faith in what you’re doing. You can never produce beautiful work by approaching it as just a job.

When Jobs went to India, he wanted to learn how to save the world. Realizing the guru was a scam, he came to the conclusion that technology serves mankind better. It turned out to be true.

Everything around us was created by people, likely no smarter than you. It’s entirely possible to create something better.

For people to believe you, believe in yourself. Build your own reality distortion field.

I just re-watched the Swedish movie Evil (Ondskan). What the movie is about is beyond this post, but it’s good and I recommend you to watch it! It’s set in an elite Swedish boarding school during the 50s, where almost all the students came from aristocratic families. This detail piqued my interest, and lead to me reading up on medieval Scandinavian history. In turn, it reminded me of how profoundly society and the power structure in our world has changed in the recent 300 years (which is a blip in the history of humanity).

Everything has changed, and is change is accelerating.

Education should prepare youth to boldly face the future as individuals. But education is still largely unchanged since the industrial era, as if the purpose is still to produce employees for factories and corporations. There is no sense of urgency about the level of change happening in today’s world. We are all busy with the minutiae our everyday lives, and not reacting to the implications of a changing world.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of the internet, globalization, BRICs, smartphones & more. The creation & distribution of value is fundamentally changing. Middlemen will die. YouTube & iTunes will kill record labels. Music players and digital distribution have killed CDs & record shops. The internet & tablets will kill magazines. Amazon will kill book publishers. Large areas of physical commerce will be killed by e-commerce. Big corporations will be killed by nimble startups. In all areas of the economy, transparency will increase, middlemen will disappear, leaving more value for creators and consumers.

The next decade marks the demise of the middle class in developed economies, a manufacturing revolution (3D printing & Made in USA), and a further blurring of the lines between man and machine.

Two generations ago, it was hard to take an invention to market. You had to apply for patents and meet with large corporations, in hopes that one will license and develop your idea further. Now, it’s becoming increasingly cheap, fast and low risk to realize ones ideas. The internet made it easy to share digital information. The next industrial revolution will remove barriers for creating and distributing physical objects on a global scale. Big factories will play a smaller role in the future, while grassroots innovation will flourish.

Just like how the PC revolution went from mainframes to personal computers, we are seeing a similar shift in physical production; a democratization of production. Not only are we changing the way things are made with 3D printers and laser cutters, we are also, more importantly, changing who does it (regular people). Makerspaces, where people can gather and collaborate on creating physical objects, are popping up around the world.

Some of the relatively new players are Kickstarter (crowd-funding for smaller projects) and Makerbot (one of the most prominent 3D printer manufacturers). What’s interesting is that traditional product design and engineering companies like Autodesk, PTC, and 3D Systems have also hopped on the bandwagon, releasing mobile apps and printing services. The path to create physical products has been shortened dramatically. Silicon Valley has minted many millionaires creating web companies, but the next wave of opportunity will lie in hardware.

The first industrial revolution was when key technologies, such as steam, cotton and the spinning machine came together. Coupled with a suitable legal and social environment, it lead to 10,000% increases in average inflation adjusted income. The second industrial revolution came with the modern factory, the conveyor belt and the associated productivity gains (Ford T-Model for instance). By increasing productivity, people needed to worry less about spending time for survival essentials, and could spend more time on things like invention, education, and arts. Things that define modernity, and push the human race forward. The third industrial revolution will be the information revolution. The proliferation of personal computers, the internet, and now the coming democratization of the production and distribution of physical goods. Already now, makers can sell direct no consumers on platforms such as Ebay and Etsy, cutting out the middle man.

In the long run, manufacturing will be less dominated by industrial mass production (economies of scale), and there will be more and more customization and and the focus on long tail consumer needs. This also implies that economies and scale become less interesting, and hence also the associated search for the lowest labor cost, for instance in China and increasingly other Asian countries. Less than a year after the book was released, we’re already beginning to see this phenomena in technology; with the new Mac Pro (made in USA) and Motorola X (made in USA, made-to-order).

hirozzzz takes some of the most amazing photos of Tokyo and posts them to Instagram. I follow him.

One day, hirozzzz starts posting photos from Janipur, India instead of Tokyo, all tagged #louisxiiireveal. It turns out, Remy Martin was running a part of their marketing campaign on Instagram, inviting two of the most popular instagrammers to document the press event for a liquor launch. See screenshots below:

My interest was immediately piqued. Did this mean that Instagram was finally moving towards monetization, perhaps by letting brands rent hashtags that they would have full control over? Wow, these Facebook guys are fast!

Only one way to find out, right?

In a spark of excitement, I quickly scan my phone for a randomly trollish to test my hypothesis. This is the result:

Within 24 hours, samhorine (the other instagrammer invited by Remy Martin) comments:

Would be great if you could delete the comment w/ the hashtag as this is a collection of photos taken on a specific trip and you know this isn’t one of them…thanks

Basically, someone quickly saw what I was doing and reported the two participating instagrammers @hirozzzz and @samhorine, one of whom in turn asked me to remove it. In other words, I messed up someone’s marketing campaign in a few seconds, with them not having any way of fixing it but asking me nicely and waiting for my response. Luckily for them, I was just testing something out, and had no intention of any sabotage, and quickly removed the photo.

Popular instagrammers’ photos can command thousands upon thousands of likes. With this in mind, a campaign hashtag containing 100+ photos will get quite a few clicks. Marketing on Instagram can seem lucrative, but you’ll have to plan it more thoroughly. With all the “get free followers” spam and trash accounts on Instagram going around, one can’t simply assume that everyone is going to play nice.

Instagram/Facebook: There are massive untapped revenue sources on Instagram, some of which can be implemented without sacrificing user experience. In fact, I would argue some implementations may even boost user experience. For instance, I would pay for renting a hashtag for a campaign. Think about it.